Google’s Area 120 Launches Quick Browser Games For Low End Phones

Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, has launched a new project called GameSnacks. It brings HTML5-based browser games that are designed to load quickly and run well even on slow connections and low-end smartphones.

Billions of people across the world access the internet through mobile devices. But they’re usually low memory devices with either expensive data plans or unreliable network connections. Such constraints make web gaming inaccessible to millions, as the games aren’t optimized for such issues.

In fact, more than half of mobile website visitors tend to leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. But on low-end devices and 2G/3G networks, a standard browser game can take twice or thrice this load time, or even worse.

This is why Google’s Area 120 came up with the idea of GameSnacks to reduce the load time and performance of browser games. They have tried to accomplish the same by reducing the size of the initially-loaded HTML page and compressing media such as scripts, images, and sounds — that is loaded only when it’s necessary.

GameSnacks currently has half a dozen playable games on it with familiar titles such as Tetris (named Jewelish Blitz), Road Fury, Bridge Of Doom, etc.

Users having a phone with less than a 1Mbps connection and just 1GB of RAM can play these games easily. In fact, Area 120 claims that these games can load in a few seconds even on network connections as slow as 500 Kbps.

Apart from the mobile web, GameSnacks titles work with both touch as well as a PC’s mouse and keyboard. Just like other casual games, you don’t really need a set of instructions to play these games.

GameSnacks is available directly on the web, but for people in Indonesia, it will be made available soon through the “super app” Gojek.

An Editor and a Tech Journalist with a software development background. I am a big fan of technology and memes. At Fossbytes, I cover all aspects of tech but my specific area of interest is Programming and Development. Drop an email if you have any software/hardware/research to share or tech-related queries!